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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2026
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| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.13945 |
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| _version_ | 1866916000608288768 |
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| author | Rizvi, Syed Muhammad Aqdas |
| author_facet | Rizvi, Syed Muhammad Aqdas |
| contents | Standard transport protocols like TCP operate as a blind, FIFO conveyor belt for data, a model that is increasingly suboptimal for latency-sensitive and interactive applications. This paper challenges this model by introducing CATS (Conductor-driven Asymmetric Transport Scheme), a framework that provides TCP with the semantic awareness necessary to prioritize critical content. By centralizing scheduling intelligence in a transport-native "Conductor", CATS significantly improves user-perceived performance by delivering essential data first. This architecture directly confronts a cascade of historical performance workarounds and their limitations, including the high overhead of parallel connections in HTTP/1.1, the transport-layer Head-of-Line blocking in HTTP/2, and the observed implementation heterogeneity of prioritization in HTTP/3 over QUIC. Built upon TCP BBR, our ns-3 implementation demonstrates this principle by reducing the First Contentful Paint by over 78% in a representative webpage download configured as a deliberate worst-case scenario, with no penalty to total page load time compared to the baseline. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_13945 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | A Case for CATS: A Conductor-driven Asymmetric Transport Scheme for Semantic Prioritization Rizvi, Syed Muhammad Aqdas Networking and Internet Architecture Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing Operating Systems Performance Standard transport protocols like TCP operate as a blind, FIFO conveyor belt for data, a model that is increasingly suboptimal for latency-sensitive and interactive applications. This paper challenges this model by introducing CATS (Conductor-driven Asymmetric Transport Scheme), a framework that provides TCP with the semantic awareness necessary to prioritize critical content. By centralizing scheduling intelligence in a transport-native "Conductor", CATS significantly improves user-perceived performance by delivering essential data first. This architecture directly confronts a cascade of historical performance workarounds and their limitations, including the high overhead of parallel connections in HTTP/1.1, the transport-layer Head-of-Line blocking in HTTP/2, and the observed implementation heterogeneity of prioritization in HTTP/3 over QUIC. Built upon TCP BBR, our ns-3 implementation demonstrates this principle by reducing the First Contentful Paint by over 78% in a representative webpage download configured as a deliberate worst-case scenario, with no penalty to total page load time compared to the baseline. |
| title | A Case for CATS: A Conductor-driven Asymmetric Transport Scheme for Semantic Prioritization |
| topic | Networking and Internet Architecture Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing Operating Systems Performance |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.13945 |